This page provides pointers to the current stable development tools
and other essentials (kernel, firmware) for the StrongARM NetWinders.

NW-9

The nw-9 image contains our
most current and best-tested toolchain. This includes gcc-3.3 and
binutils-2.13, and kernel-2.4.19-rmk7-nw1. This toolchain was used to
build all of the packages in nw-9, except for the kernel, which was built
with the toolchain from dm-3.9-28. There are a few optimizer bugs which
can be worked around by disabling or reducing optimization for affected
source files.

Note that no firmware (nettrom) is included in the nw-9 release. This
is due to a licensing issue, which has forced the removal of all firmware
from the netwinder.org site. We recommend using nettrom-2.3.3, wherever
you might get it from.

DM-3.9-28

The dm-3.9-28 image enabled versioned symbols in glibc, making it largely
incompatible with the previous dm-3.1-15 image. The toolchain is based on
gcc-2.95 which is solid but does not have a fully conformant C++ environment.
This leads to problems building many recent GUI packages, eg. qt, KDE, Gnome,
mozilla.

The image originally shipped somewhat buggy toolchain. Scott Bambrough
fixed many of the problems; his most recent toolchain updates can be found
at users/s/scottb/current which includes binutils-2.10, gcc-2.95.2,
and glibc-2.1.2, all with various netwinder patches applied. Rod Steward
issued a minor update to the compiler, it can be found at users/s/stewart/new-gcc. Source packages are included in those
directories; beyond that we unfortunately do not have sources as they
were lost in the Rebel bankruptcy.

DM-3.1-15

We do not recommend doing development on this image anymore. Porting
current software packages is simply too difficult.

Kernel

Official Linux kernels for the NetWinder can be found on the FTP site
in pub/netwinder/kernel and its subdirectories. Be sure to
read the README file
before installing a new kernel.

The dm-3.1-15 image and its OfficeServer derivatives, ship with a 2.2.14
linux kernel. The 2.2 branch has not been maintained in several years.

The dm-3.9-28 also ships with a 2.2 kernel, but it is easy to upgrade to
2.4. One must upgrade the modutils package, also to a 2.4 version, and its
associated dependencies.

The recommended kernel is presently 2.4.19-rmk7-nw1, which can be found
at pub/netwinder/RPMS/nw/9. Note that this kernel is suceptible
to a local root exploit. See the
advisory for an updated 2.4.19-rmk-7-nw2 version.

The 2.6 kernel series reportedly works on netwinder. I have not had
a chance to try it out yet.

Firmware

Firmware for the netwinder used to be found at pub/netwinder/firmware. Unfortunately, due to legal issues
the binaries have been removed for the time being. Work is underway to
construct a fully-open replacement.